


I will trust in your voice

by Wish_On_A_Wing



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alien Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jesse Manes is His Own Warning, M/M, Memories, POV Alternating, cw: child abuse [canonical], cw: domestic violence [canonical], cw: referenced canonical underage sex, cw: references/mentions of war, psychic realm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wish_On_A_Wing/pseuds/Wish_On_A_Wing
Summary: Michael knew that spending the afternoon scouring through the Manes' murder cabin with both his exesandhis sister was probably not the best idea. He expected there to be a little drama, maybe some unkind words, and for the night to end with him drinking alone – not for Alex to accidentally inhale some alien powder that would make him sink into a coma-like sleep, unable to wake up.Meanwhile, Alex is lost in the jungle of his own mind, unable to escape. With Michael's presence beside him, the two of them try desperately to find enough order in the chaos of living to bring them both back to the surface - before it’s too late.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 21
Kudos: 98
Collections: Roswell New Mexico Big Bang 2020





	I will trust in your voice

**Author's Note:**

> This work was done as part of the Roswell New Mexico Big Bang 2020!
> 
> First, a gigantic thank you to the incredibly wonderful [darlingnotso](https://darlingnotso.tumblr.com/), who was my partner for this event and created the gorgeous header for this fic and the beautiful gifsets linked below! You are so talented and awesome and I'm just so grateful to you for everything. Your art makes me so fucking happy, thank you so much.
> 
> Second, a shout-out to my amazing friends who beta'd this work: [Briefly-be](https://briefly-be.tumblr.com/), who has been accompanying me on this journey since it was a barely-formed idea - you're incredible, this would not have gotten written without you; and [straperine](https://straperine.tumblr.com/), my knight in shining armor, who came to my aid even though they're not even in this fandom. I'm so lucky to have both of you in my life.
> 
> The quote at the beginning is loosely translated from the song Blaze by Kotani Kinya. Please excuse my practically-nonexistent Japanese.

_"We kept passing each other by,_

_Missing one another_

_In this whirlpool of time;_

_But even if I rot away_

_I will trust in your voice."_

***

It's dark; a deep, obsidian, resounding darkness, the kind that makes you think pitch black can somehow possess shades and shadows. Alex can’t remember where he is or how he got there. Sounds and shapes dance around the edges of his cognition, but the more he tries to make sense of it, the more it all seems to get away from him. He can’t see his hands and legs – or feel them, for that matter. It's not that his body's gone, not entirely. He feels more… afloat. Afloat, disconnected, and entirely alone. The darkness seems to encompass him, seems to move around him, whispering terrors directly into his mind, trying to lure him further into oblivion.

Alex can’t make out what the voices are saying, but the blurry images that appear to take up his memory are threatening to drive him mad. If he could just listen in a little better… if he could just give in, succumb, only for a moment, let himself be drowned by the shadows and murmurs that long to take him with them… no. He needs to snap out of it. He needs to organize his thoughts and form a plan.

Then, far away, echoing in the endless space around him, Alex hears something. The one voice that always felt like home, even when that home seemed broken beyond repair. The one voice that always managed to soothe his spirit, even when his brain was screaming with frustration.

***

"Hey, Alex?" Michael's voice carries in the wind, "No offense, but… I really hate this place." He sighs as the four of them get out the back door and towards the edge of the property.

"Really? Can't imagine why." Alex's wry response makes him smile, small and bittersweet.

Michael isn't quite sure how his life had turned out like this. Well, it does make some sort of twisted sense – Alex is needed for the military aspect of their project, for his detailed understanding of the intent behind these things and, perhaps most importantly, this is his family's residence they're raiding; Maria is needed for her newly functioning, if somewhat un-honed and definitely controversial, alien abilities; and although Isobel was not originally supposed to be here, upon hearing Michael's plans for the day she had argued, quite reasonably, that her psychic skills will very likely be needed – though Michael suspects she just wanted a front seat to the freak-show. Still, even though all evidence point to them starting with the best conditions to deal with the task at hand, Michael can't make peace with the fact that he has wound up spending his afternoon off scouring through a murder cabin with both his exes – the only two that matter – and his sister as an added bonus.

"Love what you've done with the place," Isobel says as they cautiously step into the wreckage left behind by Alex and Michael's interrupted catharsis. She winks at Alex, who gives her one of his tiny, appreciating smiles in return. Michael supposes wanting to tear down the remnants of their past stone by stone is a thing Alex and Iz have in common.

"It's still a little too… extant for my taste," Alex replies sardonically.

"We could burn it down when we finish. It's far enough away from the main house. You have some fuel, right?"

"You seem to be speaking from experience," Alex says, a hint of humor in his voice. Isobel just smiles mischievously and raises one perfect eyebrow.

"Not to interrupt your fun," Maria intercepts, "But what exactly are we looking for?"

Michael detects a hint of impatience in her tone – something that might not pass as unusual by Isobel, but would be picked up by Michael and Alex. Michael and Maria hadn’t talked much over the past few weeks, but he had seen her around town with Alex, slurping milkshakes at the Crashdown or going to the movies, so he assumes she'd been fully updated about Michael and Alex's latest affairs – or rather, lack thereof. Michael suspects the tone is her way of telling him she's not too happy with him, but whatever. He's not too happy with her, either, so apparently, it's a shared feeling between aliens and alien-descendants nowadays.

"We're looking for anything that may explain why my grandpa killed Trip," Alex's calm, authoritative voice brings Michael back from his contemplations. "Basically, look for clues. Military documents, journals, death certificates, medical reports – anything. Grandpa Harlen was a meticulous person, but clearly not meticulous enough if he buried Trip on his own property. If we're lucky, maybe we can find something more about Michael's or Isobel's moms, or something that could help us with the fourth alien."

They spread out, rummaging through the remainders of the toolshed. This place definitely sucks, Michael thinks as he turns away from a very specific corner by the door, flexing his hand automatically. He turns towards a drawer cabinet that looks locked, then hears a crashing sound behind him.

"Woah!" Alex sounds not-quite-alarmed, and Michael turns around to see that Maria had tripped over one of the wood shards on the floor. She's fine, though – she stopped the fall by grabbing onto a lamp, which stabilized her before it fell to the floor in a big clatter.

"Careful, Maria," Michael says, unable to keep quiet.

"I can take care of myself," She shoots back.

"And no one is questioning that," Alex says in an attempt to diffuse the tension. Behind him, Michael can see Iz curl her lip in disagreement, but thankfully Maria's facing away from her. He ducks his head to hide a snicker. "In any case, Guerin is right. We don’t know what the men in my family may have hidden here over the years, so approach everything with caution."

They continue with their search quietly for a while. Smashing through the toolshed in an outburst of repressed emotions was easy, cleansing, almost fun; this is just the opposite. Michael half expects to find another dead body any second now, or worse, more images of Nora, locked up, abused, experimented on, a shell of her old self. He doesn’t know how he'd handle that, doesn’t like the rage and frustration that threaten to consume him whenever he thinks about it, doesn't want to put his temper to the test.

"Oh Alex, look at this," Maria says after a while, her voice gentle. She's sitting on the floor next to a big dusty box full of papers and photos. Alex, who's on the floor near her, shuffles closer as Michael and Isobel stand up to come behind them. Maria's holding an old photo in her lap.

"How did this get out here?" Alex asks in a low voice as he takes the photo from Maria. Michael looks over his shoulder to see a picture of three young children and a beautiful woman standing next to them. The youngest kid – no more than six or seven – is holding something resembling a ukulele, smiling wide. The other two kids are also grinning, if a little more guarded, and the woman's smile looks tired, cracking at the seams.

"Oh my god, Alex, is that you?" Isobel says, pointing at the kid with the ukulele. Alex just nods. "You were _so_ adorable! Look at you with your tiny wannabe guitar."

"I remember that thing," Maria chuckles, "He couldn’t play it _at all._ Rosa had to keep stealing it so she could focus on her homework because he was just that terrible."

"I was not." Alex pushes her a little with his shoulder, but it's playful. A ping of jealousy shoots up Michael's spine, but he pushes it back down. "So, next to you, that looks like Gregory, right?" He asks. Alex nods. "And next to him is Flint?"

Alex holds his finger on the oldest of the three boys. "No, that's Clay. Flint was always my father's son, more than any of us. He claimed going out to the reservation was a 'waste of time'."

"And that's your mom?" Isobel asks quietly.

"Yeah."

"I forgot how beautiful she was," Maria sighs as she traces her finger on the long, dark braid that falls on the woman's shoulder.

"Yeah." Alex stands up abruptly, putting the photo in the pocket of his shirt, turning away from them toward one of the desks they haven't examined yet. "She was."

The silence behind him is thick. Isobel stares at his back with a look that Michael can’t quite decipher – sympathy? Wistfulness? Then she quickly puts on one of her bright, brilliant-host smiles and proclaims, "So I was at 'Planet 7' a few days ago on karaoke night. They have the most diverse playlist I've ever seen and happy hour on cocktails –"

"And glitter everywhere, including the food, but if that's your thing then have at it, I guess," Maria mumbles under her breath.

"Bitterness causes wrinkles, DeLuca," Iz retaliates. "Relax. It's not like they're stealing your crowd."

"So, you were at karaoke night…" Michael tries to keep the story rolling.

"And Kyle and I are like, on our tenth shot of B-52. Of course, they don’t exactly sneak acetone in between the Irish Cream and the Grand Marnier, so I was maybe slightly less intoxicated than Kyle was."

"I'm sorry, Valenti drank what now?" Michael isn’t sure what the hell is in a B-52, but he's been to enough of Iz's cocktail parties to know what Irish Cream is. It isn’t for him – the taste is alright, but it’s way too velvety for his liking.

"Shush, you. Not all of us share your love for Blended-by-the-pint. Anyway, Kyle is just wasted enough for me to… maybe persuade him to do something he would usually be too uptight for." Isobel's smile is slightly wicked. "No powers, I swear," she adds as Alex and Maria both turn a wary look toward her.

"What did he do?" Alex asks, and there's a hint of amused curiosity in his voice.

"Nothing major! Just maybe sang 'Eye of the Tiger'. On stage. At the top of his lungs. With two German tourists."

"No way."

"Way. And I've got a video to prove it."

"Oh, you have _got_ to send it to me," Alex says, the laughter in his voice and eyes so apparent Michael can barely stop staring.

"Me too, please. I'll forward it to Liz and Rosa." Maria snickers.

"You can see it live if you join us for the next karaoke night. I'm pretty sure with one more shot I can get him to do 'Single Ladies'."

"Well, I mean, I _am_ single…" Alex mumbles, contemplating, and Michael's heart beats a little bit faster. He had suspected as much – he’d seen Forrest with Alex a few times, from afar, after that open mic night, but nothing in the last couple of weeks. He doesn’t quite know how to feel about the two of them breaking up. He isn’t keen on Alex dating anyone, really, he's never been the nonchalant type, and as far as Michael's concerned _no one_ is really good enough for Alex; but he wants, with all his heart, for Alex to be happy, aches in his bones for Alex to find peace and ease for once.

"Checking out the competition _and_ watching Kyle try to pull off Beyoncé? Sounds like my kind of night."

Okay. That's it. Enough is enough. "Okay, so, uh, now that you've made plans to go clubbing with not one but _two_ of my exes, Iz, could you maybe direct your attention to this drawer? I can't get it to open." It's a blatant lie, obviously. But at least it cuts the conversation off.

They continue to shuffle through the boxes and cabinets, and every few minutes one of them calls out something they'd found and puts it in the "check later" pile. Small talk peppers the silence every now and then, but Michael stays mostly silent. Isobel keeps giving him her signature "why are you such an idiot" glare when the other two aren’t looking, to which he keeps answering with an eye-roll. He often aches to share the strong psychic bond that Isobel and Max have, but today is one of those times when he feels just fine without it. Whatever, if she'd hoped to see some drama or some neat Hollywood-style resolution to his issues with Alex, then she should've come prepared for disappointment. And if anything, the way Maria and Alex seem so united, the two of them against the world – against Michael – shows him that he isn’t over-cautious.

"What on earth…?" he hears Alex whisper, about an hour into their search. The girls are apparently engulfed in their work and don't really notice – Alex is clearly talking to himself – but Michael glances to his left to see what Alex has found. It looks like he's examining a specific point high up on the wall.

"What is it?" Michael inquires softly. From where he's sitting on the floor, there doesn’t appear to be anything that fascinating about the wall. Instead of answering, Alex grabs a chair and climbs up to take a closer look. Michael notices Alex wincing a little as he pulls himself up, balancing himself carefully on his bad leg, but says nothing. He knows full well that Alex can take care of himself.

The following chain of events happens almost simultaneously: Michael feels a chill go down his spine and stands up abruptly; he hears Maria turn and yell "Alex, don’t!" just as Alex's fingers fumble with the timber; there's a soft snappy sound, and a dark cloud of powder emerges from the wood. Alex coughs loudly and makes a choking sound that causes Michael's heart to jump to his throat and plummet to his stomach at the same time. Then he simply falls down.

It's Isobel, not Michael, who has the split-second instincts. A large pillow shoots through the air, across the room, landing directly where Alex's head was about to hit the hard floor. Alex's face and shirt are smudged with remnants of the Navy-colored powder that engulfed him just seconds ago and he's not moving, lying so very still on the dusty pillow, his arms and legs sprawled in funny angles. Michael’s breath catches in his throat, the room suddenly growing smaller and smaller as if he is being pressed through a too-narrow tunnel. An insistent high beep fills his ears, the light around them seems to dim. He can’t think straight, but he needs to get to Alex before –

"He's breathing," he hears Maria say, her voice quivering but authoritative. "But I can't tell if he's injured. We need to get Kyle here ASAP. And probably Liz, too."

"I'm on it." Isobel's already pulling out her phone and slipping out of the cabin.

"No!" Maria calls out as Michael approaches Alex, reaches out to touch him, to feel him, to see with absolute certainty that he's still… that he's alright. "Don’t touch him, Michael. We don't know what that powder will do to you. Can you move him with your powers? We'll take him into the house for now."

Michael breathes. In, out, in, out. When it doesn't feel like a chore anymore, he opens his eyes and focuses, lifting Alex gently, insanely gently, with his mind, pushing aside any thought of anything except keeping Alex afloat, keeping him steady, keeping him safe.

***

"So, what's wrong with him?"

It's very late at night. They're at the hospital. Kyle and Liz had both arrived at the house within twenty minutes – luckily, Liz is in town this week, collaborating with one of Roswell hospital's labs on some top-secret project for the sketchy corporation she is working for now. She came in wearing full-on safety gear and proceeded to carefully collect all remnants of alien powder from both Alex and the cabin, then hurried ahead of them to the hospital to test and see if she could find anything. In the meantime, not without suffering through a swift examination and a series of questions from Valenti, the rest of them transferred Alex to the hospital. Kyle hurried to do more tests, leaving Michael with Isobel and Maria to just… wait. They waited for hours and hours, pacing around like caged animals, not knowing if and when they'll have more news.

Now Michael is standing by Alex's bed, Iz very close behind him, her very presence nearby a comfort beyond words. Alex looks so still that if Michael only focuses on his face, he might believe Alex is just sleeping. However, when he turns his look downward, down to the hospital bed and hospital gown, down to the IV dangling from Alex's arm, pumping him with fluids, his delusion is shattered faster than he can draw a breath.

"Short answer? Not much." Kyle answers his question quietly.

"Clearly it's something! Look at him, you must have missed something –" Isobel tries to put a soothing hand on his shoulder, but he shakes her off. He's not in the mood to be polite.

"What do you want me to say here, Guerin?" Valenti meets him eye to eye. "His temperature is a little high, and his tox screen shows low levels of an unknown substance in his blood, but we knew that already. CT scans turned out fine, there's no head injury. I consulted a friend regarding the EEG results… he said they look like something between sleep and anesthesia."

"And what does that mean?" Maria asks softly.

"When someone goes through surgery, anesthesia makes sure they don't feel anything during the process. That means they don’t respond to pain signals or reflexes, and the brain activity is different. So for Alex, it means… shit, I don't know." Even through his panic, his rage, Michael can see how stirred up Valenti is, mirroring his own feelings of frustration and helplessness. "I can't wake him up. He's responding to stimuli, but very weakly. He's not comatose, it's not like anesthesia, but he's not sleeping either. None of the tests tell me how to snap him out of this."

"Right, alright, okay," Michael pinches the bridge of his nose, hard, digging his fingernails in for an extra edge. The pain grounds him, if only a little. "I'm gonna go check if Liz has something about this weird-ass powder. Stay with him?" He looks at Iz, pleading. She nods. Maria also sits down in one of the chairs.

"I'll go see if the X-ray results are out," Kyle says grimly. It takes Michael a second to remember that he also X-rayed Alex's lungs to check for substance remnants. They nod at each other and leave the room, each going in a different direction.

Michael strides through the hospital corridors like he's been sent out to kill and the few people who are still around at this hour part for him like the red sea, but he barely notices. Even putting one foot in front of the other is an effort, but at least now he has something to do, something to distract him, something to ease the feeling of incompetence that has been eating at him. How could he have let this happen? Why weren’t they more careful? He, more than almost anyone, knew full well what the Manes men are capable of. How on earth could Michael have let the four of them go in unprotected like this?

" _Dios Mio!_ " Liz's muffled voice brings him abruptly back to the here and now. In the tornado of his thoughts, he forgot to knock. "Geez, Michael, I almost knocked the test tubes over."

He ignores her. "You got anything?"

"Yeah. Well, sort of. Just a sec." She moves away from the fume hood she's working in and removes her respirator and goggles. Michael's relieved to see her taking all precautions on this – neither he nor Liz would ever get a medal for Lab Safety, but in this case, it could actually mean life and death. The last thing they need is to lose Liz to this alien contamination, on top of everything.

"So, I've exposed some humanized mice to the residues I collected off of Alex. The only exposure that showed any effects to the mice was respiratory, meaning this thing doesn't do anything to the blood or to other tissues. It does cross from the lungs to the bloodstream, but it cleans out after 3-4 hours. My hypothesis is all remnants will leave Alex's system by morning."

"What's the catch?" Michael asks, weary. He's been around alien shit too long to assume that it would be that simple a solution.

Liz's face falls a little, though she tries to hide it. "The mice that breath it in fall into a deep sleep, just like Alex. They don't wake up, even though they do show low responses to stimuli – just like Alex. But then, after all traces are gone from their system… they still don’t regain consciousness."

He expected this. Liz would’ve come to tell them the good news if it were that easy – but nothing in his life is ever that easy, is it?

"There's something else," Liz says, holding his gaze even though he can see in her eyes that she does not want to have to say what she's got to tell him. "After a few hours like this… well, after a while they stop responding altogether. And I've already lost one of the mice."

Michael feels like the floor has just collapsed from under his feet. This can't be happening, it's not real, he's having one of his nightmares, that's it. He closes his eyes, shuts them tight, presses the edge of his palms to his eyes. The ringing in his ears, which has threatened to drown him since he saw Alex take that fall off the chair, seems to be so loud now that Michael can barely remember what anything else sounds like. A thousand different colors dance behind his eyelids. He's so mad he could blow something up, hit someone, kill someone –

"Michael!"

Liz grabs his wrist and the world refocuses again, just a little. The room is shaking – literally, just a little, everything in the room is slightly trembling.

"Hey, we're going to figure this out, okay?" Liz is standing very close, blocking out his vision so he has to focus on her face. "We're not going to let Alex die." She sounds sure, stubborn.

He breathes. The tremors of the room slowly subside. She's right, he doesn’t have the time to lose control right now, he needs to keep his mind clear. "Okay, alright, so what's your best theory? Any particular reason why they stay latent even though this shit clears out?" He avoids the dying part on purpose.

"I… I'm not sure. Could be a side effect I haven’t figured out yet, could be some sort of poison that we need an antidote for… If I just had the materials from my previous research I could – "

"You mean, your pile of stolen alien organs? Yeah, well. Not an option anymore. Any other ideas?" He's partially taking his panic out on her, but there's still plenty of justified irritation left. He didn’t even learn the full extent of her mad scientist experience until after the fact, after she had left town. He and Max consumed two bottles of acetone each and a whole lot of whiskey before Max finally let the whole story out.

"Look, Michael, this isn’t like any other material I could research, alright?" She's mad now, and her voice quivers ever so slightly. She's pacing around the lab like a tiger at the zoo. "I can't see the pathways, I don’t know how these compounds interact with the cells or what they even interact with. I don’t have anything to go on except intuition."

"Have you tried comparing it with the yellow pollen?"

"Yeah, I tried it. They're actually quite similar in their compositions, but with a few key areas of difference. I think the origin of this might also be some kind of alien plant, or, or like a mixture of plant with something else, because the different areas are vastly different. They kind of look like… well, the closest I've got is actually… your genetic material. I mean, not yours specifically. The three of you."

"Wait, Liz," Michael has an idea suddenly, "you're saying this is some kind of plant-alien hybrid powder?"

"That's the best guess I could get to under these conditions."

"Well, what if that's it?" He blurts out, and she looks at him quizzically, tilting her head a little, but she allows him to carry out his thought process without interrupting. "What if it's like, like a combination of a carrier material and alien powers? You know, a genetic manifestation of powers? That would explain why the mice are not waking up even when this is cleared, because it's a carrier, it's not the main cause of the problem, or not the only cause. It's not just their physical traits that are affected, it's their psyche."

There's a spark in Liz's eyes, familiar, the kind she always gets when she's got a possible answer to a research question. "So if it's alien powers that are affecting Alex's psyche… Then maybe alien powers can also snap him out of this."

***

As they rush back to Alex's room, the corridors are just a blur of fluorescence and melancholy. They continue to talk about the details of their most recent hypothesis – there is a very simple way to test it out, and luckily the person who can help them with that is already at Alex's bedside.

"Isobel, we need your help," Michael says by way of introduction as he enters the room, where Isobel and Maria are more or less in the same positions they were when he left them. It takes a second for him to realize there is someone new in the room.

"Hey, man," Max says, nodding his head at him from his chair at the corner of the room, and Michael really doesn’t need any more than that. A wave of gratitude for Iz and Max, for their companionship, washes over him, bringing him ashore, keeping him grounded.

Max looks behind Michael. "Hey, Liz," He says, and it's almost a whisper, yet it's so charged with all the hurt and hope and guilt Max's been harboring that you'd have to be deaf not to notice it.

"Max." Liz's voice comes from behind Michael's shoulder, and there's almost none of the heat that Michael expected to hear there. He looks back to see her averting her gaze.

"Oh, for God's sake, you two." Isobel looks from Max to Liz and back. "Don't you think the googly eyes thing is a little old? Get over yourselves, yell it out and sort this like normal people. But like, after we've dealt with the matter at hand, because it is slightly more urgent."

Sometimes, Michael is reminded of how much he adores Isobel.

"So, you were saying you need my help?" Isobel asks after the short dramatic pause she takes for emphasis.

"Yes," it's Liz who answers, eager to go back to the safety of science. "We have a theory that whatever hurt Alex is somehow affecting his psyche, kind of like your powers."

"Excuse me, I've never put anyone in a not-coma before." Iz crosses her arms.

"Well, not exactly like your powers, obviously," Liz says. "But we think it might be something similar. Like an enhanced manifestation of psychic powers."

"So, what, you want me to try and get in there to test your theory? What am I even looking for?"

"We're not entirely sure," Michael says. "If you could try and get into his head – like you told me you did at the reservation – maybe you can snap him out of this, or at least find out what's going on in there. If it works, great. If you get nothing…"

"Then we'll know to get back to the drawing board as fast as possible," Liz offers, and Michael nods. It's a much nicer way of saying they're running out of time than he would’ve come up with.

"Wait a minute," Max says, getting up to stand behind Isobel. "Won't this be dangerous for her? We don't know how this thing works."

"I don’t think so," Liz says. "I've tested this powder against Michael's blood cells and it doesn’t elicit any particular response. I think this stuff is passive for you guys."

"But you don't know for sure."

"There is no knowing for sure, Max," it's Isobel who interrupts their conversation. "It's okay, I can handle myself. I'm stronger now than I've ever been. If I feel danger, I'll pull out immediately."

Max looks at her intently, then at Alex, lying on the bed, and at Michael, standing by the door. He nods. Then he brings his chair closer to Isobel’s and drags a bag from under it, pulling out two bottles of nail polish remover.

Isobel moves closer to Alex's bed, close enough to touch him, and takes his hand in hers. Then she closes her eyes. Everyone stays quiet and Michael can practically hear the seconds ticking by. _If there is a God out there, any god at all, then God, please,_ he thinks quietly, _please let this work._

After what seems like forever, Iz breaks contact with Alex and takes a sharp breath. She puts one hand to her chest and extends the other out for support, which Max grants quickly. He offers her one of the acetone bottles, but she refuses and just takes a few more rickety breaths.

"He's in there," Iz says after a moment, her voice uncharacteristically shaky and quiet. Only now does Michael notice that she's blinking back tears. "But he's just… it's complete chaos in there. I could sort of feel Alex's presence there, but he's pushing against me. He's not letting me in enough to see. It's like…"

"like what, Iz?" Michael can't resist the urge to usher her.

"It's like a maze. His memories, his feelings, everything that compiles Alex… it's all completely messed up. I could feel it, he's so lost in there." She looks Michael in the eye. Iz has never shied away from harsh truths, and he knows she's not about to start now. "I don’t think he can make it out, not without help. But his walls are too high, I can't get through to him."

"Can you send someone else in? or take someone with you?" It's the first time Maria's spoken since he and Liz got there.

"I don't think he'll let me in no matter who I'm with," Isobel says, "but I can maybe try to send someone in. I've never done it before, but in theory, I think I know how to make it work."

"Send me in." Maria says, decisive.

"Out of the question," Michael says.

"I'm not asking, Guerin." She gives him one of her icy looks, and he realizes she's telling the truth. He realizes, though not for the first time, that she's separated herself from his input and he doesn’t have any say in what she does anymore. The realization doesn’t cause him as much outrage as it did a few weeks ago. The urge to protect her will always be there, like it is for anyone Michael has ever been close to, but in the end she was right. For all sorts of reasons, they just don’t work together.

He meets her gaze and nods at her, trying to convey what he hasn’t said to her yet – can't say yet – and the glaciers in her eyes melt away. In that moment, it's almost like before – before they'd gotten involved, before he dove head-first into caring for her even though he was already soul-deep in love with Alex, before their beliefs strayed so vastly apart from one another. And Michael thinks that maybe, just maybe, they could eventually go back to being friends after all.

Isobel moves her chair over to where Maria's sitting, on the other side of Alex's bed, and takes her hand. Then, they both close their eyes and focus.

This time it doesn’t even take one minute before Iz's back. Maria regains consciousness just a beat after her.

"He's not letting me in, either," she says, wiping a hand under her nose – it's bleeding a little. Michael bites his tongue, doesn’t say anything. "But I think there's one person he might let in. Even now."

She turns to look at him. Suddenly, Michael realizes they're all looking at him.

"Woah, wait a minute, me? How can _I_ lead Alex out of his own mind? I don’t…" He doesn’t even know the way through his own mind, half the time. Hell, he and Alex have been twisted in each other's lives for over a decade and he couldn’t even find a way to untangle _that_ mess, and that's when they were both present and with clarity. How could they expect him to lead Alex back to sentience, when the truth is that Michael doesn’t even fully know his way around his own experiences, when he doesn’t even know if Alex could still want his presence, when he's afraid of what he might find in there?

He doesn’t say any of that. Instead he coughs and says, "I mean, doesn't it need to be, I don’t know, someone who knows all about his past? I don’t know much about Alex before seventeen, how can I guide him if his memories are gone?"

"It's not like he has amnesia," Isobel explains. "At least, I don’t think. It's more like a labyrinth, but a really complicated one, the kind you need a map to navigate, or clues. Alex should know his way; you just need to give him the clues."

"Well, how the hell do I do that?" Michael throws his hands in the air in frustration.

"Just… ask him questions, talk to him, work with him. He's disoriented, you need to help him focus. Help him sort out what he already knows."

"Right. That's not vague at all," he mumbles under his breath, mostly to himself, but Iz wrinkles her nose at him disapprovingly anyways. Everyone's gazes are still fixated on him and he feels naked – not in the fun way. But he's willing to try anything in order to get Alex out of this, however slim the chances are.

"Okay, everyone, out. The less people in the room, the better. I think it affects his defenses," Isobel says, and Michael's grateful. He doesn’t know if she can really sense Alex's defenses going up or if she just said it because she knows it'll be easier for him to relax with everyone gone, but he's thankful either way.

They all get up to leave. Maria locks eyes with him, nodding at him before she leaves. Liz squeezes his arm. Max taps him on the shoulder, saying "you got this, man," as he leaves the room with his book. Then Michael and Isobel are alone with Alex.

"Sit down, Michael. I can't do it when you're hovering over me."

Michael sits down, bringing his chair close, so close to Alex that the bottom of the bed rubs against his knees. Alex looks pale, or maybe it's just Michael's imagination playing games with him, telling him to believe the worst. Other than that, he looks… well, he looks just like Alex. Michael takes him in, reminds himself why he's doing it, what he's risking, why he's got to make this work no matter how hopeless the very idea of it may seem.

He takes Isobel's hand in one of his and wraps the other around Alex's wrist. "Okay, Iz. Give it your best shot."

***

"Alex? Alex, You out here? Please be out here." Michael's voice sounds far away, as if coming from another realm, but it _is_ Michael's voice for sure. It takes Alex a moment to associate how that voice makes him feel with who it belongs to, but he would recognize it even from thousands of miles away.

"Alex?" Michael cries again, and it vibrates and resounds in the endless space around him. It manages to chase away the other voices Alex is hearing, for the time being. With the whispers and the murmurs subsiding, he finds he's able to concentrate just a little better. He tries to answer, to lead Michael towards him, but finds that he can't. It's like one of those nightmares where he doesn’t have a voice, where he screams and screams until all he can remember is the sound of his own terror, but no one can hear him.

"Damn it, why is it so dark in here?" Michael's voice sounds even farther away now, like he's looking for Alex in the wrong direction, even though there doesn’t seem to be any direction at all.

Alex consciously refuses to let the panic get the better of him, pushes it away and uses his newfound focus to try to gain control of the situation. One, two, three. The muttering voices are completely quiet now. Four, five, six. The blurry images fade into the darkness around him, not quite gone, just pushed aside for the time being. Seven. Eight. The vastness of the space around him seems slightly more familiar.

"Guerin." His voice is coarse and quiet, like it's protesting the use of it but nevertheless obeys. "Guerin, I'm over here." This time it's a little louder. It's not like he’s speaking, exactly – more like he’s willing himself to be heard. Michael's sigh of relief is the warmest thing Alex has heard in a very long time. It's also suddenly very close, and seems to be coming from all around him, encompassing him. Yet he can see nothing but darkness and amorphous shapes looming in the shadows.

"Man, I thought for sure this wouldn’t work. Remind me to hug Isobel when we get out of here."

It's hard, but the proximity of Michael's voice allows Alex to visualize him. It's like recalling the details of a story read long ago: first remembering only how it felt, pulling out the details taking some effort. Now, he can see that Michael is right there, materializing in the obscurity in front of him, looking like he always does – unraveling edges and soft curls, kind eyes that seem to hide behind them a world of hurt and endless wit and more than a little mischief. It's _Michael_ , and he's here, and Alex would never admit how relieved he is to see him again.

"Hey, Guerin," he wills himself to say.

"Where are you?" Michael's reply seems to resonate around him, although Alex can still see him clearly, facing him.

"What do you mean? I'm right here."

"Yeah, I can hear you're close, but it's pitch dark in here. I can't see you. Or anything, actually. I can't see me, either. I'm just sort of… here."

"Really? That's weird, I can see you, you're right in front of me. Can't see myself, though. I'm just sort of here as well," Alex replies, puzzled, then something Michael had said before suddenly sinks in. "Wait a minute. You said, 'when we get out of here'. Where are we?"

Michael is silent for a moment. Instead of answering, he asks a question of his own. "Alex, what's the last thing you remember?"

"I, um…" Alex tries to utilize the momentary pause in the chaos that is composing his surroundings to recall the order of events that has brought him here. There were… people. People he knows, people he cares about. And… somewhere familiar. He feels disoriented, like this is costing him efforts beyond his limits, like something is resisting his attempts to regain control. He tries to push back. The darkness around them seems to shake and brighten, dangerous colors start to rise from all directions. There are crashing sounds in the distance, like glass breaking, and incoherent yelling.

Michael seems to pick up on the shift in environment. "Okay, Alex, don’t lose your focus. We were at the toolshed – you, me, Maria and Isobel. Remember?" As he says it, faces float into Alex's vision. He can see Maria and Isobel, and then their faces seem to sink back into a whole picture and Alex can see the piles and piles of papers and documents surrounding them.

"Right. We were… we were looking for clues on something?" It's a question, but mostly to himself. His own mind seems to resist him. Pulling out the memory feels like trying to recall a dream you could have sworn you remembered perfectly just this morning, but as Michael reminds him of the details the fog around the memory seems to disperse a little. "And… and I fell. Did I hit my head? Am I dreaming this? Are you just a figment of my imagination?" He asks Michael accusingly.

"Uh… would a me that's a figment of your imagination tell you that I'm a figment of your imagination?" Alex doesn’t even know how to begin answering the question, but it doesn’t matter, because Michael continues speaking hastily. "Anyway, no, you didn’t hit your head. You inhaled some unknown alien substance, probably something your family was studying with the military. Fun, huh?"

"Your definition of fun baffles me," Alex says, deadpan, but it's fond.

"Anyway, you kinda guessed one thing right – we're in your head. Sort of. I honestly have no idea what Isobel calls this space, but that's where we are. We couldn’t wake you up from the outside, so now we're trying it from the inside."

"What do you mean 'we'? Is anyone else here?" He doesn’t mean to sound defensive, but he does. The images of the memory he's managed to conjure disappear completely, leaving nothing but black in their wake.

"No, no, it's just me. Iz opened a crack for me, but you… well, you wouldn't let anyone else in."

Michael gives him a sidelong look; a little sheepish, a little hopeful, a little mischievous – and suddenly the image shifts, and Michael looks to Alex like he's seventeen again. It's so familiar and so sudden, it's almost overwhelming. Then he shifts back to being the Michael that Alex associates with more recent sentiments.

Alex tries to stay alert to the problem at hand. "Right, so what do we need to do?"

"Not completely sure," Michael shrugs, "Isobel said this thing has jumbled up your psyche, and you need to find your way back to the surface. I'm just here to try and guide you."

Alex thinks about that. He would follow Michael to the ends of the world, to the eye of the storm if he asked, if he needed it, and he knows now that Michael would do the same for him, even though he once doubted it – but he doesn’t know how to follow Michael back to safety. This is new territory, for both of them.

"I don’t know how," Alex admits. He finds honesty a little easier, in here, in his disorientation. It's a new sensation, one he's not sure how to feel about, so he shoves it aside as best he can for now.

"Well, try to concentrate on my voice. Close your eyes, or whatever the hell equivalent of that is when you're inside your own thoughts."

"As far as motivational speeches go, Guerin, I've got to say it's not your best."

Michael rolls his eyes at him, pouting.

"Oh, come on, don't give me that face." Alex says.

"What face? I don’t even have a face!"

"Right, right, sorry," Alex says, but he's laughing, and it's light-hearted and freeing. The sound of his own giggling revibrates in his mind, and he uses it to try and listen to Michael's advice. "Okay, I'm the-equivalent-of closing my eyes." He finds that saying it makes it easier for him to perform, to shut down the shapes dancing in the shadows and even the image of Michael from around his vision.

"Okay, so now just…" Michael's voice still surrounds him, "try not to think about anything specific, because that didn’t work well before. Just try to see where your mind takes you first."

There's a blur of images and sounds – people talking, an old inaudible song with static in the background, a rainbow, a cup of coffee gone cold – but soon the whispers from before seem to grow louder, as if trying to drown out his own memories.

"Keep talking," Alex tells Michael.

"About what?" Michael asks. He's by Alex's side now – Alex can just sort of sense his presence there.

"Anything. Doesn’t matter. Something here is trying to drag me down, your talking helps me to stay attuned."

"Right. So… lovely weather we're having?"

"Guerin, how do you fix a sputtering engine?" Alex just pulls the question out of thin air. He knows it's the right thing to ask, without remembering how he knows.

"Oh, well, that depends on the source of the problem. It's usually the fuel system, but…" and Michael starts explaining to him, getting lost by the easiness in which mechanics come to him. The sound of his fluent, confident explanations is like the lighthouse Alex needed to guide him through the storm, to shut out everything else and just breathe.

He can hear a guitar tuning in the background. He can smell Saturn's Rings and hear the sizzling of frying oil. He can feel the flow of warm, desert wind on his face.

Then there's a shift in the flow of sensations as they become more directed. Alex keeps his concentration on Michael's voice, and the blur of experiences slows down gradually, until he can hear the sounds of excited whispering and laughter louder than any other background noise. A scene comes up to his mind, foggy at first, but not distorted or overly sharp. He tries to muster just a little more focus. It costs an effort, but it doesn’t disorient or drain him like before.

He notices Michael has stopped talking. "Guerin?" He asks hastily, trying to keep his voice leveled.

"I'm here,” Michael answers. His voice is steady, trying to be reassuring, but Alex can hear the anxious edge of it.

Then there's another voice, one that doesn’t belong to either of them, rising over, loud and clear and so very familiar. "You are _not_ telling me that you think Will Smith is hotter than Brad Pitt!"

The foggy memory is as clear as looking-glass now. It's almost like watching a movie from within the shots – a movie that Alex thought he just vaguely remembers, only to find out upon pressing play that he's actually seen it before and knows most of the lines by heart.

Liz, Maria and his younger self are sitting in Maria's old room, on the floor, dozens of pillows and blankets strewn around them. Alex can almost smell the popcorn in the air as he notices the bags lying by their side.

"Brad Pitt is way too much of a pretty boy!" Maria retorts against Liz's accusation.

"Oh, and Will Smith isn’t?"

"How old are you here?" Michael's voice somehow sounds both closer and farther away than the girls' voices. Alex looks to his side and sees that Michael is still standing there, staring forward.

"I think… probably fourteen? It's summer vacation. We rented a movie on DVD." Alex recollects as he answers. "Wait, can you see it?" He asks Michael.

"Yeah," Michael nods, "still not feeling very physical, though, can't see me or you. You know, you-you, not this younger you. Nice T-shirt, by the way." Alex looks to see that the young him is wearing his old Pink Floyd T-shirt – it's a little oversized, but Alex used to love that shirt. He now vaguely remembers getting it from his mother's wardrobe.

"Will Smith is a different kind of pretty," the little Maria says. Her hair is braided back – Alex has forgotten she used to wear it long when they were younger.

"They're both equally polished," young Alex says.

"Judge me all you want, Will Smith has a soft spot in my heart due to his constant appearances in my childhood," Maria says unapologetically. She's always been like that – it's one of the things Alex loves most about her.

"Your mom does love _'Independence Day',_ " Liz teases.

"I get that," the younger version of Alex says, and it's a little weird, a little awkward, remembering back to his old self like this, but there's something nice about it, too. His sleepovers with Maria and Liz, he now remembers, hold some of his happiest childhood memories. They were a blessed escape from his everyday life. "I mean, I will always have a weakness for Viggo Mortensen. Aragorn was one of my first major crushes, after all."

"Aragorn? Really?" There's a slightly familiar rise to Michael's voice.

"Jealous, Guerin?" Alex teases.

"Absolutely not," he answers, but his voice is still a little higher than normal. "So they…?"

"Know I'm gay? Yeah," Alex answers. The answer comes to him naturally, and then he recalls something else. "I've actually come out to them that summer. They were the first people I came out to."

"How long did you know?"

"For sure?" Alex contemplates. He finds that the context of a memory and Michael's questions help him remember. "Since I was about twelve, I think."

"Long time to carry it around on your own," Michael comments.

"I sort of battered around with the idea for years before then, though. I was used to it." He says it matter-of-factly, but when Michael looks at him with that sad look in his eyes. Alex has to remind himself that there's no point in telling him to stop, because he's not actually the one doing it.

There's a loud noise that comes from the edge of his memory – the door swinging open. Mimi Deluca walks in, in all her previous glory. She's wearing neat, tight jeans and a flattering yellow button-down, her curly hair much shorter and less wild than Alex remembers it, with barely-noticeable honey-toned highlights and natural makeup on.

"Holy shit," Michael breathes out next to him.

"Yeah," Alex knows what he means. He's filled with twin sensations of warmth and cold – warmth, because he now remembers why this moment is so important to him, and cold, because he also remembers suddenly that Mimi Deluca will not stay this radiant much longer.

"Shouldn’t you kids be sleeping by now?" Mimi asks. It's not really scolding.

"15 more minutes, please?" Liz pleads, batting her eyelashes.

"Very well. Scooch." Mimi sits down on the floor with them, putting down a tray with four cups of herbal tea. Alex still remembers the taste – deep and complex, with hints of orange zest and a touch of honey. The memory fills him with a pleasant, hearty feeling.

"How was work, mom?" Maria asks her.

"Oh, the usual," Mimi says, looking tired for a second, but she’s smiling wide to hide it. "How about you guys? Did you have fun?"

"Yeah, we watched 'Ocean's Eleven'," The young Alex says.

"Ugh," Mimi makes a distasteful face. "Brad Pitt is such a pretty boy."

The three kids exchange looks and start cracking up. Mimi doesn’t question them – she's always been great like that, knowing when to give them the space they needed to form their own bond.

"So, I'll be going to bed soon," Mimi says once they've all finished their tea. "But first, anyone up for a reading?" She has that familiar glistening in her eyes.

"I'm out," Maria says decidedly. "I like living in the darkness, thank you."

"How about you, Alex?" Mimi looks at him, "been a while since I examined your lines."

The young Alex hesitates, but gives out his palm after a second. Alex is now remembering Mimi's touch, always so gentle, as she sinks in his memories into her own space.

"I see a great crossroads in your future," Mimi says quietly, "but the doubts that clouded your aura seem to have dispersed a little. I'm glad." She gives him a warm look before she continues. "Music can be a mentor for you, if you let it. And I see…" She closes her eyes for dramatic effect. "I see a beautiful figure of great significance to you. I see twilight and music, stolen kisses and long, soft curls."

"Actually, Mimi…" The young Alex says. His breath hitches, and Alex remembers the weight of the decision his younger self is making, how much he wanted, while hating that he even cared about that, for Mimi to accept him despite what he was telling her. "I'm… I'm not… well, I'm gay."

Mimi opens her eyes and gazes into young Alex's, doesn’t break her gaze, doesn’t even blink. It's like the air in the room has gone thick, just for a split second, and then Mimi pulls him in for one of her tight hugs, rubbing her hand against his back. Alex remembers the warmth, how much it hurt, how he felt light as air and heavy as lead at the same time, and how much he loved Mimi in that moment.

Then Mimi breaks the hug, and the twinkle is back in her eyes. She winks at him. "I didn't say it was a girl."

Mimi gets up to leave with the empty mugs, but the scene is already starting to fade into the shadows.

"I wish I'd known Mimi Deluca when she was like that," Michael comments quietly after what could be a second or an hour – Alex is not sure.

"Yeah," Alex agrees quietly. "She was something."

"I'm glad _you_ did, though," Michael says, so honest Alex almost loses his balance. Michael's always been like that – desperate to protect the ones he loved, wanting the best for everyone around him even as he sabotages his own happiness. It used to make him want to reach for Michael, hold him tight and never let go, but at the same time it drove Alex crazy. Then again, loving Michael has always been easy as breathing, but never as simple, has it?

Alex can hear whispering voices in the distance, ones that don’t quite seem to belong there. He doesn’t want to lose momentum. He needs to keep going, keep talking, keep his head straight. "Hey, Guerin?"

"Yeah?"

"You asked me when I knew for sure. How about you? When did you know you were bi?" It's something Alex has been wondering.

There's another quiet moment before Michael answers. "Well, I was toying with the idea for a while, like you. There isn’t one clear moment for me. But I think… I think I only knew for sure when I started noticing you."

Alex doesn’t know what to say to that. Fortunately, he is spared of the need to respond – there is a shift in the shadows around them and suddenly more images fly by at high speed, as if someone pressed fast-forward on Alex's mind. Something Michael said must've triggered another memory.

The flow of visions slows down, little by little, and suddenly Alex can smell wood.

They're at the toolshed.

At first Alex feels a chill, wanting to back away, wanting to shut the memory out on instinct. Then he hears contented sighing, and his mind relaxes automatically.

The scene becomes sharper. He can see the walls, the objects cluttered in the corner, and the bed. It's early afternoon, and there's movement between the blankets – he and Michael, young and relatively careless, basking hazily in the afterglow of their first time. His younger self has one hand in Michael's hair, playing with the curls, and he remembers, even now, being surprised by how soft they are. He remembers wanting to freeze the moment, wanting to play with Michael's hair forever, hearing Michael's satisfied cat-like humming in his ears.

"Okay, we have officially crossed over from weird to bizzarro," the Michael next to him says.

"Tell me about it," Alex replies weakly as he looks, mesmerized, at the picture in front of him.

"Hey, you're the one that brought us here," Michael quips.

"I don’t exactly control it, Guerin." Alex replies, slightly pissed – partly because Michael's just being snarky as usual, and partly because Michael has distracted him from his flashback. "It's something like… like a dream, or a daydream. You don’t always know when or where your mind takes you until you get there."

"It's like a dream, no end and no beginning…" Michael sings quietly, the melody so familiar it’s ridiculous.

Alex's mind completes the line despite himself, but instead of indulging Michael he asks, "are you seriously quoting Madonna on me right now?"

"What can I say?" he looks aside to see Michael shrug, "Isobel loves her."

There's a deep intake of breath that comes from Alex's memory, and the Alex and Michael of the here and now turn their attention to their younger versions.

"Hey," young Michael asks, "you okay?"

The young Alex looks down, breathes deep. Wrings his hands together. Breathes again, hitched, and Alex can almost match his consciousness to the confused desperation his younger self is experiencing. "Yeah." His image says as he turns around, wrapping the blanket around himself and clutching it so tightly that Alex can almost feel the ache in his palms reverberating through the memory. "I'm fine."

But he wasn’t, Alex knows to say now. The contradiction between everything he's ever been taught versus how _right_ he felt in that moment was almost too much to bear. Alex remembers the images that ran through his mind, the words that echoed in his ears, and the warmth, the sense of complete and utter belonging as Michael wrapped his arms around him.

The young Michael doesn’t say anything for a while, doesn’t move, just holds him tight. Then he touches his arm, kisses his shoulder, holds his hand until he turns around. Michael kisses his lips, soft and gentle, and Alex remembers how loved he felt in that moment, how safe he felt as Michael sensed his worry, tried without words to melt it away. He remembers that Michael smelled like a rainy day, which only made Alex want to curl up against him even more.

They lie like that for a while. Then Alex asks Michael, "What do you plan to do after graduation?"

"Actually…" young Michael replies, and Alex can hear the cautious anticipation in his voice. "I got a full ride to UNM. So… that's the plan, yeah."

"Wow. That's amazing, Guerin. Congratulations." The young Alex says, and means it with all his heart.

"What about you?" Michael turns the question back at him.

"I… I don’t know yet." Alex replies honestly. It's been worrying him for months, eating at him, but unlike with everyone else, talking to Michael about it doesn’t feel like a burden. It's nice and comfortable – sharing plans, thoughts, aspirations. "My entire family expects me to enlist, but… I don’t know. I'll figure it out. One thing's for sure, though, I am so quitting the Emporium."

The Michael in the memory laughs, carefree and beautiful, and suddenly Alex rises to a sitting position. "Oh god, the Emporium. I still have to close up!"

Michael gets up as well, stares at him for a second, and then they're both laughing. It takes them a while to stop, and it's so freeing to hear it that Alex can almost sense it all across time. They start to get dressed and as they do Michael touches him again.

The door opens.

Suddenly Alex feels cold. He remembers the smell of gunfire – that day was his father's regular day at the shooting range. He remembers how scared he was, despite hating himself for it. He remembers wanting to disappear, but more than that wanting Michael to disappear, wanting to shield him, wanting to get him as far away from his father as possible. And he remembers, vividly, what's about to happen.

"Okay," he says decidedly. "Let's leave it at that. We remember how it goes from here."

He concentrates, trying to will the memory away. He feels stronger now, more confident in his position, and it works – the memory fades.

In all the trauma that had colored his experience with Michael in the toolshed that day, somehow this memory had managed to slip away from him. It was always tainted with his father and violence and the feeling of helplessness.

"Guerin?"

"Yeah," Michael's voice is wary.

"Are you sorry you didn’t get to go to UNM?"

He can sense, even before Michael answers, that this isn’t the question he was expecting. "Are you sorry you enlisted?" he retorts, just a little begrudging, but Alex doesn’t bite. Not here, not this time. He wants to use this space to get straight answers, to finally stop this dysfunctional cycle of unanswered questions and unsaid-almosts and misinterpretations between them.

He tries to will Michael to see that he's not falling for it, that he's waiting for a reply, but it's much harder when Michael can't see him. He reaches for verbal communication instead. "Don’t do that, Guerin. Please. Don’t… deflect like that. I'm asking because I want to know."

Michael sighs. He takes a long time to answer. "Am I sorry I didn’t go? I don’t know, Alex. It was too long ago to know, now. This hypothetical Michael out there, the one who went to UNM, he's so different from me that I just can't say if I'd want to be him or not." Honesty rolls out of Michael in waves. Always has. "But I’ll tell you one thing I am sorry for. I'm sorry I lied to Isobel for ten years. I was so busy trying to protect her, trying to shelter her, that I didn’t even stop to consider that maybe she didn’t need my protection at all. I think… I don’t know. We were all different, back then. Maybe if I had acted differently…" he gets lost in thought.

"You were just kids, Guerin," Alex says. He remembers everything Michael's talking about, now – he couldn’t reach it before, but since Michael got in and they've started to make sense of everything, his memories have started to click back into place. It's still incomplete, still disorienting, but he has easier access to things, at least. "You did the best you could. There's no point in eating yourself up for that."

"Yeah, maybe," Michael says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. "So, where to next?" He adds, trying to change the subject. "Do you need me to go back to the sputtering engine?"

"No, I think I can do it myself now, thanks." Alex tries again to let his mind wander, while still keeping his focus in his presence there, now, with Michael at his side. Again, there is a blur of amorphous sounds, images and feelings, but this time he notices that flowing through them doesn’t cost as much effort, and he almost doesn’t feel tempted to lose himself in the current.

He looks up at the sound of cars honking and nervous chattering. He can almost feel the dust grazing his hands – there are so many people and vehicles around that there is not enough time for it to settle, so it just hangs around in the desert air. Alex can almost feel the sting in his eyes, which was only partly due to the dust.

It takes a moment for Alex to spot himself in the crowd, but finally he sees himself. Alone, determined, jaw clenched so hard it was kind of painful, scared shitless but very good at hiding it, stands his younger self in the parking lot in front of the big glass doors.

"Where are you?" Michael asks, pulling Alex away from the memory.

"There, in the middle."

"Yeah, I can see that," Michael says, and Alex practically hears the eyeroll in his voice. "I mean, where is this?"

"Albuquerque MEPS. Military Entrance Processing Station." He adds after a second of thought.

"So, this is…?"

"This is the day I shipped out to basic training, yes."

"Where's your family?" Michael asks, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. "I would’ve thought for sure your father would be here, proud of his little soldier."

"The Manes men don’t get seen off," Alex says, and it's a direct quote from his dad – one he's heard ever since he was just a little boy, one that he remembers ringing in repeat in young Alex's ears right now like a broken record. "Manes men are only welcomed back."

Michael snorts, but stares ahead and says nothing.

Alex looks at the young version of himself. He's thin and slender – all his build came later on. He remembers hating that, because he did start a training regime when he enlisted. He wanted to be stronger, tougher. His hair lies flat against his head, with just a little gel – he had started styling it that morning by force of habit, but stopped after remembering it would be cropped by the end of the day anyway. His fingernails are bare – Alex now remembers he only took off the black nail polish late the night before, after saying goodbye to Maria, unable to do it any earlier. It felt like losing a piece of himself, a defiant piece of individuality. He also slept with all his rings and his earings the night before, leaving them at the bottom of a locked drawer in his room early in the morning, another piece of individuality left behind.

It would take a long time for him to be comfortable in his own skin again, for him to start liking his new self. For the first few months after joining the Air Force, Alex remembers feeling like a toy soldier fresh off the conveyor belt at a factory. But eventually he learned to find new individuality in his own circumstances.

Little Alex looks around at the other people assembled there – almost all of them with families, parents or siblings or grandparents, some with friends as well. Maria wanted to drive him here, but he insisted she didn’t – no point in making this harder, he told her. Alex now remembers worrying that he would find her outside his house in the morning, that she would insist on showing up, that she would remind him, just by being there, of everything he's about to leave behind in Roswell and the risk he's about to take. But she didn’t. She respected his request to go alone, and Alex loved her for it.

His younger self swallows, hard. Then he walks in through the doors.

"Manes, Alex," he tells the soldier at the front desk. He doesn’t know if the soldier can hear the very slight quiver in his voice, but he sure could feel it.

"Down this corridor, to the right," the soldier orders after a quick look at the computer.

"You look nervous," Michael comments. Then he blurts out, "why'd you do it, Alex? Huh?" It sounds like half a question, half an accusation. "You know, I tried and tried, but I just don’t get it. You're nothing like your family. Why join the fucking army?"

"My family's not all bad," Alex counters, trying to keep the anger that always comes as the defensive at bay. He truly believes it – Michael may think he's being stupid for still looking for the good in people, but Greg has turned out to be remarkably supportive, for all the while that it took him to get there, and whatever Flint does next, Alex will make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else.

But he doesn’t tell Michael that. It would be so easy to deflect with that, to fall into that argument again, but he had just demanded the truth from Michael, insisted that he break the cycle and say what's on his mind. The least Alex can do is abide by the same rules.

"You asked me before if I'm sorry I enlisted," Alex answers instead, after taking a while to formulate his response. "I'm not. It's just like you said – that other Alex, the one that stayed, is so vastly different from me that I just can't see myself in him." War is the worst thing that's ever happened to Alex. Even as adrift as he's been at the start, even with all his memories jumbled up, it's something he'll always know in his core. The worst things always stay with you, one way or another. But he's also learned and grown so much during his ten years of service. He just can't separate the army from the man he's become. It's too big a part of him. "I left because… God, it was easy, Guerin. The easy way out. I needed room to grow, to find out who I am outside of my family, outside of my house, outside of Roswell."

"Then why not leave town? Just… go somewhere else?" Michael doesn’t sound bitter or angry anymore. He's genuinely asking.

"I thought about it, at first. But things got so messed up. I felt trapped, and I didn’t think that running away to another city, or even another state, could change that. I needed to fight… something, someone, and I couldn’t do that where I was, the way I was." He needed to fight something he didn’t love, he means. Fighting someone else's war seemed so much easier than fighting his own demons. "Can you… I don’t know, can you at least try to accept it? Even if you can't understand it?"

They're silent for a long time. Finally, after what seems like forever, Michael says, "Yeah. Okay. I'll try." And he actually sounds sincere. It's not the end of that discussion. Alex knows that, he's not naïve enough to think that one honest conversation will solve ten years of hurt. But at least it's a start.

The corridors of the Albuquerque MEPS, which have been gradually fading in the background of their conversation, finally disperse completely. This time they shift back to obscurity for just a second, before shifting into another scene. Their pace seems to be picking up, and Alex almost feels like himself again.

There's the sound of a piano – a simple, easy piece. The scene sharpens. It's Alex's childhood home, he's in the living room. He's about ten. The piano, which has since been broken and thrown away by his father, sits in the corner of the room. Alex is sitting on the stool, and next to him, showing him how to play, is…

"Mom," the kid in the image says, "Can you show me again?"

Alex looks over at Michael, but he doesn’t say anything. Alex doesn’t want to be here, but he can't bring himself to look away from the memory.

"Sure, Alex." Her voice is sweet as honey and cool as an ocean breeze. Alex wants to wrap himself up in her voice and go to sleep. "Pay attention, it goes like this. Follow the notes on the music sheet."

She starts to play again, slowly, and stops every few notes, allowing young Alex to copy her. It's sweet and innocent, and it only lasts a minute before there's a jiggle of keys and the door swings open.

Alex can tell his father is in a foul mood just by the way he walks in, by the restlessness of his three brothers walking behind him, by the distress in their eyes. It only takes him a second to look over at the piano and slam the door.

"I thought you said the boy was sick," his father's voice is quiet, but there is nothing calm about it.

The little Alex clings to his mother, even though he knows by now it's not going to do him any good. His mother shakes her head, speechless, and Alex can remember feeling her tremble.

His father draws near them, hovering closer like a vulture.

"Jesse, please…" Alex's mother says in a shaky voice, tears streaming down her face.

"Dad, we were just –" smack. His father hits young Alex so hard with the back of his hand that he falls to the floor. Alex knows it doesn’t make sense, but he swears he can feel Michael's fury rolling off of him in waves.

"This is your fault, you know," Jesse says, now turning towards Alex's mom. "You coddle the boy, make him soft, make him _weak_." He says the word with disgust, and spits on the floor. It hits right next to Alex's face, where he's lying on the floor, holding a hand against his bleeding lip and trying to hold back his tears.

Alex watches as his mother crumbles to the floor, a wreck, not even trying to shield her face as his father punches her.

"I don’t know why you think you can hide these things from me." His voice is low and deadly and he's crouching over her now. "I know everything, you got that? Everything." He holds her by the throat and she struggles to breathe.

A small voice, hesitant and trembling, comes from the edge of the room. "Dad, I think maybe –"

"It's not your job to think, Gregory. You've never been any good at it. Your job is to shut up and learn."

His mother makes a choking sound. The little Alex in the memory tries to get off the floor, but his father is faster, there's another blow –

"Alex!" Michael's yell pierces through the scene. "Alex, calm down. Focus on me. I think we've seen enough." The rage underneath Michael's attempts to stay calm is unmistakable. Only now that Michael has pulled his attention does Alex notice that everything is shaking – the shadows around them, the images in front of him – and there's a high-pitched ping in the background, like a constant alarm.

"I…" Alex mumbles, unable to speak. He's locked this memory far, far away and tried his best not to recall it. Now it hit him at 300 miles an hour, and Alex was not prepared.

"Come on, shut it out. You can do it. Just follow my voice. Don’t make me start with the shop-talk again."

Alex chuckles, a strangled sound; the humor helps. His panic subsides enough for him to shut out the siren blaring around them. The images start to blur.

"Alex?" Michael calls to him after a moment, hesitant.

"I'm okay," he says and tries to make himself believe it.

Michael reads through him. "It wasn’t you, Alex. It was your dad. There was nothing you could’ve done, nothing in the world would have satisfied him."

"This is right before she left," Alex mumbles. "She left maybe two, three weeks after that. Took off in the middle of the night. Tucked us in, we woke up and she was gone. No trace of her anywhere." He blurts it all out, unable to keep it in.

"That's not on you, either," Michael says. "Okay? None of this is on you."

"I know. I know that." And he does, he does know that. It's just hard sometimes to keep it in mind. "Thank you," he whispers to Michael after a moment, and tries to convey in two simple words everything he wants to say, how truly grateful he is that Michael is with him.

The last of the fuzzy images disperse. The silence only lasts a second, then the sound of a piano comes to life once again, but it's different this time, a little muffled, reverberating. It's a beautiful melody, and it only takes Alex two or three notes to recognize it. His vision tunnels. He feels cold.

He's not ready.

"We've gotta get out of here," He says to Michael, his voice deadly quiet.

"What?" Michael sounds confused. "What do you mean, get out of here? Get out of where?"

"We've got to go, you can't be here, come on, Guerin, remind me of something else, anything else!"

"Okay, okay!" Michael says, frantic at Alex's urges. "Uh, shit, I don’t know. Remember the time the school took us to Walker Aviation Museum?"

"I'm surprised you do. You disappeared as soon as the bus parked." Alex remembers, but as much as he tries, he can't make that day appear, nor can he make the sound of the piano that he knows is only in his mind to stop. The singing starts.

_Mama… Just killed a man…_

"Is that… is that Queen?" Michael asks, uncomprehending.

_Put a gun against his head…_

Things start to come to Alex's view. Sand. Desert. Buildings ruined.

_Pulled my trigger, now he's dead…_

Gunshots. Soldiers struggling to get out of fire range.

A single body. The first person he killed, but not the last. He didn’t even see the man's face before he took the shot. Everybody has to take a shot at some point. That's how it works.

It's all still misted, but he can't shield Michael from his visions much longer. He can't shut out the paradoxically angelic voice of Freddie Mercury now any more than he could after he took that shot. Couldn’t turn it off for days, weeks after the fact. There's really only one thing he can do here.

"Michael." His voice is authoritative. Commanding. "You have to get out of here. You have to leave."

"What?" Michael demands as the sound of gunshots and barked commands strengthens around them. "No. _No._ You're insane if you think I'm leaving you here."

"I'll be okay. I can handle this. Go. Now." He's not taking Michael to war with him. There is just no way. Violence and brutality and the army have taken too much from him already. This is Alex's fight and no one else's.

But Michael's not going anywhere on his own.

So Alex musters everything he has, every ounce of control he's regained since he got here, focuses on Michael one more time, and _pushes._

"Alex, what are you doing?" Michael's voice already sounds slightly farther away.

"I'll be okay, Michael." He reassures again. Calm. Precise.

Bohemian Rhapsody reaches a crescendo. The guitar is as loud as though they were at a concert. There's an explosion in the distance.

"Alex! Alex!!!" Michael's voice echoes, distant now, as Alex pushes him out. There are screams and gunshots all around him. Michael's voice is swallowed by Queen and Freddie Mercury and the sounds of war.

***

Someone is playing with Michael's hair. At first he thinks it's Isobel, but it's been years since she's done that. it feels nice, though. Tingly and… warm. His eyelids are so heavy, and he knows he should fight it, he knows he should open them, but it feels so good. He doesn’t want to wake up just yet. He sighs, small and content.

"Morning, sleeping beauty."

Hearing Alex's voice is like walking into a hot bath at the end of a long day. It sounds so affectionate that Michael just has to open his eyes – but then he sees white sheets, smells the disinfectant, and everything that's happened hits him like a wave.

"Alex! Are you okay?" he lifts his head from where it's resting on Alex's bed, abruptly, but has to put it between his knees as nausea hits him and black spots start to dance in his vision.

"Easy, Guerin," Alex soothes. "You've been out for a while. I think our little trip cost you more than a little fatigue."

Michael just nods. Breathes in and out. It's just like with pain, he tells himself, just block it out. And just as he thinks that, Alex's hand gets into his field of vision, carrying a bottle of nail polish remover. Michael takes it and sips, and immediately feels better. Slowly, he lifts himself back to a sitting position.

He notices his chair is still where he had placed it, achingly close to Alex's bed, which is now lifted to a sitting position. Alex is smiling one of those small, peaceful smiles of his, and he looks… well, he always looks good, but he looks healthy. Just a little pale. Almost as though nothing has happened.

Almost.

"How are you feeling?" Michael asks, instead of what he really wants to ask.

"Good. Just a little tired. Kyle says he wants to keep me here another night for observation, but everything's back to normal."

Michael sighs in relief. He didn’t even realize how much he was holding his breath until he got to let go.

"How long was I out?" he asks.

"Six and a half hours."

" _What._ "

"Maybe longer, I'm not sure how long you were sleeping already when I woke up. I think my pushing you out may have taken its toll. I'm sorry." Alex says it matter-of-factly, but Michael can hear in his voice that he means it.

"Yeah, well," Michael says, looking at the floor, and he's bitter despite himself. After all they've been through this past year, after literally roaming the labyrinth of Alex's mind, eventually Alex pushed him out anyway. It's nothing new, so why does it still sting every time?

"Michael," Alex says in that calm, decisive tone of his, and damn if Michael can keep looking away when Alex calls for him like that.

Their eyes meet. There's something almost desperate in Alex's eyes. "I'm not sorry I made you go. I just…" Alex breathes deep, and the desperation in his eyes grows deeper, like he's trying to will Michael to understand something, something underneath his words. "You would never have left on your own, and I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t take you with me. Not there."

Michael doesn’t know how to react to that. "I could've helped. I wanted to help." His eyes sting. There's a lump in his throat.

"I know. I love that about you." The fact that Alex is using present tense makes Michael's heart beat like a jackrabbit, threatening to leap out of his chest. His anger has subsided, just a little, making room for hopefulness.

"Then why…?" Michael is trying, with all his might, to keep the line they had going, to stop deflecting, like Alex asked him to. But it's hard, it will always be a hard habit to break, and he just can't bring himself to complete the question.

"Because you can't will my problems away at all costs. That's not how this works." And Michael knows he's right, but he's only just started to accept that in the last year or so. It's hard. It goes against all his instincts.

"Look, Michael, I didn’t mean to… I pushed you out because I felt like I had to, I wasn’t going to take you to war with me, and I had to deal with it on my own, but I –" Alex pauses, breathes, and Michael has to actively stop himself from interrupting. "It's not that I didn’t want you there, I wasn’t… I wasn’t pushing you away." Alex leans forward a little, touches Michael's hand, looks at him with those intense eyes as though he's still trying to tell Michael something without saying it. "I only made it out thanks to you." Alex adds, quietly, after what seems like forever.

"Nah," Michael counters, unable to stop himself. "I just gave you a nudge in the right direction, that's all. You can do anything on your own."

"Maybe." Alex is still holding his gaze, and Michael could drown in his eyes. "But that's just it, Michael. I don’t want to."

Alex closes the distance between them, slowly, and Michael doesn’t back away. When they kiss, it's slow and gentle and sweet, almost innocent. Michael slowly becomes intoxicated with the sensation of soft lips and slightly exploring tongues and _Alex_. Alex's hand still holding his, Alex's soft skin as Michael traces his lips down to his neck, Alex's quiet, contented sigh, Alex's other hand clenching his hair just a little desperately.

They both have wounds that will never heal completely, and they're written all over each other's scars. But Michael has tried to run from it, to take the easy way out, only to wind up in Alex's arms again. Loving Alex is the best thing he's ever done, even if it was once tied up in a lot of pain. Coming back to him feels like coming home, but this time it also feels like a choice. If they're written in each other's scars, and they can choose each other despite that, or with that, then it just makes them that much stronger.

The door opens. "Hey, no blocking the patient's airways. He's still recovering, geez."

Valenti is standing at the door, deliberately not looking at them as they part. He goes over to read Alex's chart and check his IV.

"I need to change the bag," he says, then turns to Michael. "And you should go down to the waiting room and tell the others you're awake. Apparently, your siblings are more annoying when they're concerned. And apparently, no one in this group seems to think I actually have a job to do." That last one is muttered, but they can both hear it anyway. They look at each other and try to disguise their laughter.

Michael gets up to leave, but Alex squeezes his hand. "Talk more later, maybe?" it's almost a whisper, and Valenti is gracious enough to pretend to be fumbling with the IV bag.

Michael pulls Alex's hand close and kisses him long and tender under the palm, where his pulse is beating steady. It's a little intimate, a little personal to do in front of other people, but Michael's never been big on modesty, and they have a decade of hiding and hurt to make up for, so Valenti will just have to deal.

There is still so much for them to smooth over. They will still drive each other crazy from time to time. Michael suspects they're still lightyears away from anything in their lives being easy, and new problems are bound to arise as they go. It's not a new beginning. But it's not the way it was, either. It's a third path, somewhere in the middle, one they can both choose to take.

"Talk more later. Definitely," Michael promises.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Will Trust In Your Voice [Artwork]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055274) by [notsodarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsodarling/pseuds/notsodarling)




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